Ryan Winn is the Humanities Department chair at College of Menominee Nation. He wrote the following in response to Sarah Burtymowicz article entitled, “Tribal colleges give poor retun on more than $100 million a year in federal money”. To read her article, click here.

Dear Ms. Sarah Butrymowicz of The Hechinger Report,

I’m still waiting for your retraction. It’s been more than three months since you published your deeply flawed article, “Tribal colleges give poor return on more than copy00 million a year in federal money,” and I’m waiting for you to admit to cherry-picking quotes and arriving at sensational conclusions. I thought that by now the published rebuttals of your piece would’ve prompted you to recant your story, but it seems you’re determined to stand by your incomplete analysis. Yet before I write off your journalistic credibility based upon flawed assertions such as “tribal colleges often have abysmal success rates,” I’m compelled to do my part to help you see the error of your ways. The question is: What’s the best way to teach you how to listen?

NEAR WYMORE — The days must have been hotter, longer than anyone on this pleasant spring morning could begin to imagine.

Ryan Christensen knows he could never fully understand what the Poncas experienced on that long march south to Oklahoma from northeastern Nebraska, so he doesn’t try.

But he’s glad to be walking on this graveled former rail line near the path Chief Standing Bear once traveled.

“It’s more just like an educational experience for me,” the 19-year-old English student said. “It kind of gives you a different perspective.”

Nearly a dozen Peru State College students walked along the Chief Standing Bear Trail south of Wymore on Thursday, a field trip for a class that has spent much of the spring semester learning about Standing Bear’s quest for home and justice.

In 1877, Standing Bear led his people on a forced march to Oklahoma from their home in northeast Nebraska. Later, he would return to Nebraska with some members of his tribe. He was captured by the Army but was allowed to fight for his freedom in court.

Standing Bear’s trial in 1879 led to him becoming the first Native to be legally recognized as a person.

CATOOSA — Cherokee Nation officials handed out more than $4 million in car-tag revenue funds to area school districts Friday as part of its annual Public School Appreciation Day at Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Tulsa.

Each year, the tribe allocates 38 percent of the revenue generated by its car-tag sales to northeastern Oklahoma school districts. Previously, funding was only given to districts at least partially within the Cherokee Nation’s 14-county jurisdictional area or within a two-mile buffer zone along its boundaries.

However, with tribal citizens statewide now able to purchase car tags, the Cherokee Tribal Council amended its car-tag law in February to include school districts just outside of the tribe’s jurisdictional areas in Tulsa, Rogers, Wagoner, Mayes and Muskogee counties. Those five counties alone accounted for $1.5 million in car-tag revenue in 2014.